Teen Wolf News Special Report:
- EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the fourth in a series of articles on one of the more interesting aspects of Teen Wolf Fandom. User Calicokat approached me with the idea of introducing folks to the "META" concept of Teen Wolf. There are many facets (as there are with each portion of the fandom) but the simple premise behind the META movement is that there is a hidden narrative across the seasons. These articles are not designed to be a comprehensive treatise on the subject, we're only touching on the basics. These articles should in no way be considered canon.
Guest Author: Calicokat
- Derek: I think you're gonna be okay.
- Jennifer: Obviously, you've never taught high school. In 20 minutes, I have to start two dozen teenagers on The Crucible, and I honestly have no idea what I'm gonna say.
- Derek: Well, why don't you start by telling them that it's an allegory for McCarthyism?
- Jennifer: Is that a subtle way of suggesting that I shouldn't say anything?
Teen Wolf cites a whole slew of literature from Shakespeare to spy thrillers. I fully credit the show for getting me reading again. Often more thematic than scene by scene, the books circle around themes of dreams, delusions, and existential uncertainty.
A Tale of Two Cities[]
- Derek: I have to find the others. They think I'm dead.
- Jennifer: Well, maybe that's a good thing. You know how many characters in literature use a false death to their advantage? You ever read Les Mis? Tale of Two Cities? Romeo and Juliet?
A Tale of Two Cities is a book given multiple times in the series.
A Charles Dickens novel set in the French Revolution, the story begins deep in the mist where a messenger is traveling to deliver the news political prisoner Dr. Manette has been "recalled to life" after eighteen years of imprisonment.
His teenage daughter Lucy Manette, who has never met him, is called on to care for him.
Dr. Manette and Lucy end up exiles from France living in London on "a curious corner for echoes" where echoes of the future carry from the stairwell into the rest of the house.
Eichen House is a reversal on this small and sunny, although foreboding, home, massive and dark and echoing the past.
Disenfranchised nobleman Charles Darney, meanwhile, escapes the revolutionary mobs through his false death to live with Lucy, his love. Although it takes Derek until S4 to follow with his own "false death", he fulfills Jennifer's words.
It took a reread for me to realize the depth of the supernatural elements of the story and its rich elemental or alchemical symbolism. A highlight: The poor of Paris are connected subconsciously – or 'superconsciously' – through the vast rivers of the unconscious, another world of water.
The Works of William Shakespeare[]
- Chris: It's not that bad. We don't know. We can't know. Not for sure.
- Gerard: It's a bite from an Alpha.
- Chris: She's my wife. Allison's mother.
- Gerard: And I'm the cold-hearted patriarch holding his family to its commitments. We all have our roles. Just don't expect me to play poisoned king to your Hamlet of a son.
References to Shakespeare run throughout Teen Wolf, some overt and others more subtle, like characters sharing lines from the plays:
- Jennifer (Lady Macbeth): Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.
- Stiles (Othello): Chaos is come again.
As dkoogler suggests, the scene of Allison throwing off the trappings of her girlhood and stripping down to a pair of men's boxers recalls Lady Macbeth's famous "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty."
Jackson's backstory shares much with the story of Macbeth character Macduff - both being born by C-section from a dead mother.
Most interesting to me, the show as a whole appears to use Othello's dual time schemes, with a short calendar the ages are reckoned by the moons seen in the show and a long calendar by which the events are measured both shown on the Sheriff's wall in "Anchors" and referenced in dialogue, such as in these back to back scenes from 2x11, "Battlefield" giving different timeframes since the end of Season 1:
- Deaton: Scott said almost the same thing to me a few months ago. One day he could somehow tell the difference between which animals were getting better and which were not.
- Peter: It's quite a situation you've got yourself in here, Derek. I mean, I'm out of commission for a few weeks and suddenly there's lizard people, geriatric psychopaths, and you're cooking up werewolves out of every self-esteem-deprived adolescent in town.
Here, Deaton and Scott didn't have their conversation about Scott being a werewolf until 2x03, "Ice Pick," after Peter's death.
The obscure timeline is emphasized in lines like Cora's in Visionary after she gives her age as seventeen:
- Cora: Well, seventeen how you'd measure in years.
Like in Othello, this allows the story to be paced briskly while, for the characters, the events carry the emotional resonance of having occurred over a much longer period of time.
Thrillers[]
The majority of the books in the background in Teen Wolf are political, medical, and romantic thrillers. Unfortunately, these are books I haven't dove into reading yet.
One title that appears multiple times across seasons is the romance/suspense novel Into the Fire by Suzanne Brockmann.
I'm halfway through its 756 pages, and can tell you it's the story of Vinh Murphy, an ex-marine reeling from the death of his wife who may have killed the polarizing neo-Nazi figurehead Tim Ebersole.
Problem? He can't remember if he committed the crime.
While the "trashy" romance novels on the floor of Vallack's cell are all creations of the props department referencing film and television, Into the Fire has the Teen Wolf-common theme of altered states of consciousness and psychological investigation.
The Race, a piece of political intrigue I've hit up that's featured on the shelf in the lakehouse's soundproof room, is similarly psychologically themed.
The Benefactor[]
A novel by Susan Sontag, The Benefactor is the story of a man who creates his life in the image of his dreams. A meditation on Gnostic and Buddhist philosophy, it focuses on creating and exploring one philosophical scenario after another.
This is one of the rarer works I believe can be cited by quote as well as theme. Chapter Eight presents the scenario of a nobleman who, while in power, murders hundreds of children. After a long, tyrannical rule he is finally tried and executed. The novel's characters go on to discuss how someone could commit so many violent crimes. The book's main character, Hippolyte, puts forward the nobleman 'illustrates the problem of satiety':
- All acts are undertaken in the hope of their consequences. What passes for being satiated is simply the arrival at the consequences—the fulfillment—of one’s act. But sometimes the moral atmosphere becomes clogged. There is a backlog of consequences. It takes a long time for the consequences to catch up with the act. Then one must go on repeating oneself, and boring others, in the interval between act and consequences. This is when people say, he is insatiable. And sometimes—very rarely to be sure—there are no consequences, and one has the impression of not being alive at all.
The book's other scenarios are also familiar. To pick a few examples:
- A house burned down around a major character who survives deformed from her scars.
- A boy who plays long games of chess with 'perfect attention' resembling Stiles' long game of Go in 3B.
- A gnostic sect's cosmogeny of the god Autogenes who carelessly populates the world with 'angels and powers' with a 'superabundance of creative gestures' but with a total lack of self-awareness… ….resembling the accidental realization of Peter's pained raving about creating supernatural creatures in his image.
And Beyond[]
- Stiles: You should have done your reading, Scott.
Do I believe that every book title in Teen Wolf is important? I think the titles that can be seen are all topical, whether selected by the writing team or the props department.
Since I'm always on the lookout for new books, I've noticed all the clever ways props manages to place books in the show without visible titles and the tendency to use tight focus to blur shelves in the background when too many unrelated titles would be readable. The shelves I'm able to read always seem to have only a few identifiable books even at high resolution.
There's a glut of 'Book Club' posters decorating the background of BHHS and the way every character is shown reading or next to place-held books in their down time and never playing on their phones or even playing video games until Liam and Mason in S4.
Books featured on classroom boards and in dialogue tend to be 'classics' and include:
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The Little Mermaid by Hans Christen Anderson
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Two isolated titles in the background that stand out from popular literature are
- Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan.
While the US grade school 'literary canon' tends to be books by men and a bulk of the omnipresent thrillers are written by men, books by women on my Teen Wolf "on screen" reading list include:
- Yellow Moon: A Novel by Jewell Parker Rhodes
- Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" by Alexandra Ripley
- Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner
Books by women are also on the list of things I can't quite make out, like a supernatural romance novel by Sherrilyn Kenyon in a stack the camera just missed focusing on, (x ).
As with all the Meta components of Teen Wolf, there are many more titles glimpsed in the show. If you're interested in more I've put together a list on my Tumblr: (x )
